It was late 1999, and I had just finished modeling out an incredibly complex model of a Free Space Optical high-speed Internet access business for an incubator that itself would run out of money within another year. An incubator is a company that helps fund and develop other companies, usually in exchange for equity, and I was working for an incubator in New York after having failed to get my first novel published.

The boss of the incubator had decided that Free Space Optics, which is basically fiber optic high speed technology that’s beamed over the air from building top to building top, was a huge opportunity, so I’d spent the last few months helping design and modeling out the financials for an FSO network in NYC.

I sat down at a big, long glass conference table in our penthouse office in the meatpacking district in downtown NYC, and after showing up thirty minutes late, in walked our Nortel sales representative along with his regional boss and a couple underlings.

“What do you need from us?” was how the sales representative started the discussion after we’d all made our introductions and sat down. I thought it was a bad way to open a sales pitch, but then I almost fell out of my chair when his boss then said, “Look, we’ve got more demand and orders and customers than we know what to do with right now, so this pitch of yours better be good.”

Our chairman described the FSO network for NYC that he envisioned building using the latest Nortel FSO equipment. I explained our detailed financial model that I’d built, and we talked about our first potential order from Nortel, which would be nearly $10 million in equipment to get the network in NYC partly built. The Nortel guys basically laughed in our face and soon left for another meeting with another customer of theirs that probably had a bigger order to place, as we never did get that equipment from Nortel ordered.

I walked out of that meeting with the head of finance for the incubator I was working at, and we went to his desk and before we could finish our conversation, he had pulled up his personal stock portfolio on the Internet and was showing me how much money he’d made on all his technology investments, including Nortel, over the last year. I asked him if he realized how much of Nortel’s revenues were coming from them extending “vendor financing” to customers like we’d just asked for. He brushed off the question and continued talking about all those profits he had in his portfolio and all the money he was going to make. Nortel was at $80 a share at the time, and its chart was straight up in a way that all the chartists love to see.

I’d recently started a website called Teleconomist and I wrote a scathingly bearish article on it that eventually got me a regular gig at TheStreet.com that was all about how bubbled up telecom and tech stocks in particular were.

I hope you’re selling the heck out of every single share of hyped-up speculative stocks like the aforementioned fuel-cell and marijuana hyped-up bubble stocks and others while you can. Most all of these hyped-up penny stocks will likely be back below their all-time lows in less than a year. And for those of you who are complacent about your own big ol’ technology stocks like Google $GOOG, Priceline $PCLN, Facebook $FB, Tesla $TSLA and the rest of the mega-cap tech stocks, you should also be aware that Nortel went all the way from $80, when it had over a $100 billion market cap, to less than a dollar before eventually delisting.

Cody Willard writes Revolution Investing for MarketWatch, posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com, which is not affiliated with MarketWatch, and is the largest shareholder in Scutify‘s parent company, Wall Street All-Stars. At time of publication, Cody was net long Google and Facebook. Follow Cody on Twitter at twitter.com/codywillard.

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About The Cody Word

Cody Willard writes the Revolution Investing investment newsletter for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com He is the founder of WallStreetAll-Stars.com and the principal of CL Willard Capital. Cody serves as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is on the University of New Mexico Alumni Board. He was an anchor on the Fox Business Network, where he was the co-host of the long-time #1-rated show on the network, Fox Business Happy Hour. Cody, a former hedge fund manager, and his stock picks and economic outlooks have been featured on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ABC’s 20/20, CBS Evening News, CNBC’s SquawkBox, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, as well as in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other outlets.